Queer Coding Characters in Harry Potter: Remus Lupin

Rebecca Chretien

Queer Coding Characters in Harry Potter: Remus Lupin

Abstract:

The character of Remus Lupin in J.K. Rowling's famous Harry Potter series is coded as queer, seen through his status as a werewolf and the nature of his relationships with other characters. Fans, especially those who are queer, expand on this oppositional reading of Remus by writing fan fiction about his life and expanding on his story, reclaiming it as their own.

Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model is a method by which to consider how messages transmit in popular media. He describes that messages on the production side of media are shaped by certain social contexts, then they are interpreted by audience members that have their own personal contexts. He continues to describe that audiences will either do a dominant reading of media, meaning they accept the intended meanings, or they will do an oppositional reading. When it comes to oppositional readings in decoding media, audiences will intentionally subvert the intended, or encoded, meanings of certain texts if they do not agree with them, or if they do not line up with their personal values or outlooks. These meanings usually revolve around things like class representation, feminist outlooks, or sexuality (Hall). This is not a new concept, but sometimes it takes more time for criticisms of popular media to arise. Even though the series had been explored for queer subtext for years, after British author, J.K. Rowling’s, negative comments on the transgender community were released on Twitter in the summer of 2020, her famous Harry Potter series has been put under an even larger magnifying class in the search for diversity and inclusivity. While the series is incredibly popular, it lacks diversity in the characters’ ethnicities and sexualities. Therefore, the fandom does deeper analyses of characters to find the subtext of unintentional queer storylines. A popular character who is a recipient of these analyses is Remus Lupin. The character of Remus Lupin is queer coded by J.K. Rowling, and the Harry Potter fandom, especially those who are queer, do work on their own to expand on this oppositional reading and the character of Remus. Since Rowling’s depiction of queerness proves to be problematic in her story, fans in their oppositional readings create better and more uplifting narratives for characters like Remus.

The Harry Potter series is one of the most popular and beloved fantasy series in the world. The story started as a collection of seven novels, and eventually turned into an eight-part film series that grossed $7.7 billion worldwide, making it the third highest-grossing film series in the world. The story then expanded into an entire universe with plays, websites, short stories, and articles to expand on the storyline and characters. The series follows the story of Harry Potter, a young, orphaned, wizard, as he grows up and attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with his two friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. He soon discovers that with the help of his peers and loved ones, he must defeat the darkest wizard of all time, Lord Voldemort.

Harry establishes many connections with adults throughout the series, one being Remus Lupin. Lupin is introduced as Harry’s Defense Against the Dark Arts professor in the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He is characterized as an introverted, intelligent, kind, and good-natured man. At a point in the novel, readers discover that Lupin was a close friend of Harry’s deceased parents, James and Lily, and also the escaped criminal, Sirius Black. At this point in the novel, Sirius is believed to be the person who was the cause of James and Lily’s deaths, leaving him to be hated by Remus and the majority of the wizarding world. Throughout the story of The Prisoner of Azkaban, it is clear that Lupin is hiding a secret, and it is not until the climactic end, after his long-awaited reunion with Sirius Black, that it is revealed that he is a werewolf. This revelation is significant because in the Harry Potter universe, J.K. Rowling makes it clear that werewolves are highly prejudiced against in the wizarding community. They are required to put themselves on the Werewolf Registry provided by the government and lock themselves away every full moon because of the danger they pose to society for their condition they cannot control. All werewolves are encouraged to feel ashamed of themselves and try their very best to hide their condition, because no one in the wizarding world knows whether to classify them as a human or a beast. This is why after Lupin is outed as a werewolf to the Hogwarts community at the end of the term, he tells Harry he departed his position because “[parents] will not want a werewolf teaching their children…I could have bitten any of you…” (Rowling 423).

After the release of The Prisoner of Azkaban, queer readers were able to easily identify with Remus Lupin’s struggles. They felt that due to many of his character traits and interactions, such as his lycanthropy and the nature of his relationship with Sirius Black, J.K. Rowling had coded him as a queer character. However, when J.K. Rowling killed off Sirius Black and married Lupin off to another queer coded character in the series, Nymphadora Tonks, fans took it upon themselves to do oppositional readings of Remus Lupin’s sexuality. This proved to be difficult, because of J.K. Rowling’s harmful metaphors, stereotypes, and adamant pushing for Lupin’s character to be seen as straight.

Rowling admitted that Remus Lupin’s lycanthropy is “a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS’” (Straube) and the conversations about them in the 1980s and 1990s as she wrote the books (Romano). Fans had a serious issue with this metaphor due to another werewolf character present in the series, Fenrir Greyback. Greyback, the werewolf that attacked Remus as a child, preys upon and bites as many children as he can while they are at a young age, and then tries to get them to join his pack and turn their backs on the rest of the wizarding community. He is depicted as a character who thrives on being a werewolf and is proud of who he is, yet Rowling characterizes this pride as inherently evil. Remus on the other hand, quite literally hates himself and tries to keep himself isolated from others the majority of the time, deeming him a “good” werewolf and unlike the others. Queer fans took this metaphor as “an incredibly damaging view to take of people with HIV, and feeds into the stigma that people who have HIV are unsafe, untrustworthy and intentionally malicious” (Julig). Therefore, Remus’s departure from his teaching position at the end of the novel plays out as a queer man removing himself from a situation with young children, because he genuinely believes he is “unsafe” to be around and “malicious”, even though he proves himself to be an incredible teacher throughout the entire novel. The only moment he ever posed a threat to others was due to a long series of unfortunate and uncontrollable events at the end of the story. So, while this metaphor was extremely harmful, readers still did a negotiated reading on it, because the metaphor still codes werewolf characters, especially Remus, as queer. As Stuart Hall describes it, a negotiated reading is when fans will find a compromise between a dominant reading of something and an oppositional reading. Therefore, the dominant reading is partially accepted while the rest is rejected (Hall), which is what is seen in this lycanthropy metaphor that runs through the series.

In 2015, Rowling published an article about Remus Lupin on a Harry Potter website named Pottermore at the time. This article confirms that Remus is straight and does not and never did have any sort of attraction to men. This article’s confirmation of Remus’s sexuality frustrated fans because “in making Remus Lupin a straight character, Rowling has co-opted a disease [, HIV,] and erased the turbulent, troubling and very much queer history of it for, seemingly, no apparent reason” (Valjeans). Of course, Rowling did not have to make her character queer, but by using a disease that largely affects gay men, and then coining the character who metaphorically has it as straight, erases so much history and meaning for queer readers that could have shown through in Remus. Additionally, her lycanthropy allegory, while harmful, could have made a lot more sense if she followed all the way through.

During the production of The Prisoner of Azkaban film, the actor who portrayed Remus Lupin, David Thewlis, even acted as if Remus were a gay man. As revealed in an Entertainment Weekly article, director “Alfonso Cuarón, in the rehearsals, without J.K. Rowling’s knowledge, told [him] that [his character] was, in fact, gay” (Vary). When this note became public, it gave fans yet another reason to argue that Remus Lupin was gay, since the official director of the movie thought so as well. However, the movie was released a couple of years before the novel in which Remus begins a relationship with an unexpected female character, Nymphadora Tonks, rather than his childhood friend, Sirius Black, which erased any potential for a queer storyline.

Throughout the series, Remus Lupin has a close connection to Sirius Black. When they first reunite in The Prisoner of Azkaban, they are instantly able to read each other’s minds, constantly embracing each other, and “quarrel like an old married couple” as described by the character of Severus Snape in the film. After Black is proven innocent of his crimes and the series progresses, the two men begin to live together, share constant stares, and even give Harry a joint birthday present. While a close relationship between two men does not always have to be romantic, this one can be read as so, especially considering the character of Sirius is also coded as queer.

Due to this relationship seen throughout the series, combined with the lack of information about Remus’s time at Hogwarts with James, Lily, and Sirius, fans take it upon themselves to write fanfiction about this period, calling it “The Marauders Era.” These fanfictions almost always include a romantic relationship between Remus and Sirius. Fanfiction like this is usually seen on websites such as Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. An example of one of these fanfictions is a story called “All the Young Dudes” written by MsKingBean89. This story charts Remus’s time at Hogwarts up until the events of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book of the series. This particular fanfiction tells the story of Remus coming to terms with his sexuality, his relationship with Sirius Black, and what it would have been like to be a young queer person in the 1970s. While some fanfictions will be stories of Remus at Hogwarts, others will be set in entirely alternate universes, such as modern-day scenarios, to give new perspectives of his story, still pairing him with Sirius. Readers choose to write these multitudes of fanfictions due to the inherent lack of queer stories in the Harry Potter universe. Furthermore, since the main queer coded character in the series, Remus, has little to no background information, they are able to develop his character more while providing queer representation so that their stories can be shared too.

In The Prisoner of Azkaban book and film, J.K. Rowling codes Remus Lupin as a queer character, and even though she uses metaphors that are harmful to the queer community and plot lines that try to diminish potential queer stories, fans do their best to do oppositional readings on Remus’s character and his sexuality to create a better story for him and provide diversity for the Harry Potter series. Even though Remus’s sexuality has always been a topic of conversation ever since the third novel was released, it was important for this conversation to open back up after J.K. Rowling directly attacked the queer community. This study of Remus proves Stuart Hall’s original model of the encoding and decoding of messages in the media. J.K. Rowling encoded her original intended messages into her work, and fans decoded their own readings, dependent on their own beliefs and values. The writing of fanfiction about Remus Lupin in order to give more depth to his character is a clear-cut example of fan studies, specifically slash. Fanfictions additionally help with moving away from what was mainstream at the time of the novels being written and progressing Remus’s story alongside modern day society’s progression.

Works Cited

Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Univ. of Birmingham, 1973.

Julig, Carina. "Opinion: HIV and 'Harry Potter,' a Troubling Message." University Wire, Oct 03, 2016. https://www.proquest.com/wire-feeds/opinion-hiv-harry-potter-troubling-message/docview/1825381778/se-2?accountid=10932.

Romano, Aja. “The Harry Potter Universe Still Can't Translate Its Gay Subtext to Text. It's a Problem.” Vox. Vox, September 4, 2016. https://www.vox.com/2016/9/4/12534818/harry-potter-cursed-child-rowling-queerbaiting.

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Waterville, Me.: Large Print Press, 2003.

Straube, Trenton. "Harry Potter and the Secret HIV Metaphor." Poz, 12, 2016, 1, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/harry-potter-secret-hiv-metaphor/docview/1844221829/se-2?accountid=10932.

Valjeans. “Remus Lupin: Hijacking a Queer Narrative.” Velociriot!, 10 Aug. 2013, velociriot.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/remus-lupin-hijacking-a-queer-narrative/.

Vary, Adam B. “'Harry Potter' Cast Talks Their Favorite Scenes and How Remus Lupin Was Originally Kinda Gay.” EW.com, April 2011. https://ew.com/article/2011/04/15/harry-potter-cast-favorite-scenes-remus-lupin-gay/.